Great Powers

In September 1714, the elector of Hanover crossed the North Sea to be crowned king of Great Britain. His reign as George I marked the beginning of a close yet fraught relationship that would shape the destinies of both Britain and Germany, with profound consequences for Europe and the modern world order.

Great Powers tells the story of this relationship from ancestral alliance to bitter enmity and, eventually, reconciliation. It reveals the many links that united Britons and Germans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the unprecedented violence they inflicted on each other in the twentieth, and how they have grappled with its legacy ever since. The book's sweep takes in not only the crises that led to conflict and dictatorship, but also the great cultural achievements brought about by people moving across borders: the birth of new ideas, music, art and literature. Drawing on diaries, letters and many other first-hand accounts, Jan Rüger shows events unfolding through the eyes of those in power as well as the many who were caught in between: families separated by war, refugees escaping persecution, emigrants starting a new life, exiles returning to the country they had been forced to flee.

Evocatively written and deeply researched, this is the engrossing history of the making of two nations, their destructive pursuit of power and the shared past that binds them together into the present.

'Engrossing, deeply researched and elegantly written', RICHARD J. EVANS

'Judicious, balanced and compelling', IAN KERSHAW

'A deeply humane reading', NEIL MACGREGOR

© Jan Rüger 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026